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Organizing the masterclasses into a curriculum?

Discussion in 'Info, Requests, etc.' started by Evan_Arnett, Jul 8, 2017.

  1. #1 Evan_Arnett, Jul 8, 2017
    I keep seeing the same question getting asked over and over again in the other forum's masterclass thread: "Where do I start?" "What order should I take the classes in?" When there were only a few classes, it made sense that one could just choose a topic they wanted to learn about and start anywhere. It's also worth considering that every one who starts on these is coming from different sets of skills, and different goals. As the number of classes has grown, it can be a bit overwhelming to choose where to start or where to go next.

    Do you guys think it would be worth trying to come up with a general set of recommendations for how to get through these classes, assuming you are starting from scratch? I remember reading that comp 1 and 2 were generally considered the best place to start. I just feel like it would be helpful to have a recommended outline or sticky somewhere to address this issue.

    You could even have different recommendations for different goals. For example, I was thinking that for someone who was starting out and wanted an introduction to writing like Williams, maybe Comp1 -> Comp2 -> Orchestration -> Scoring -> Here's Johnny 1 -> Here's Johnny 2.
     
    Rohann van Rensburg likes this.
  2. #2 Krzysztof Fokow, Jul 8, 2017
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2017
    At VI-C I gave my little thought on how I felt about the "Core" course should look like (in the original post I forgot about "Rhythm and Percussion") .
    Theory 1 -> Composition 1 -> Orchestration 1 -> Composition 2 -> Orchestration 2 -> Kickstarters -> Counterpoint 1 -> All that Jazz -> Theminator -> Mod Squad -> Structure -> Rhythm and Percussion -> Putting it all Together.
    At any point of this sequence Secret Weapons and Needful Things can be watched, as they provide additional insight on the variety of topics.

    And then there are supplementary courses:
    The "Scoring" course
    Scoring 1 -> Action Scenes -> How to score a film in 7 days

    The "Composers" course:
    Impressions -> Here's Johnny -> Here's Johnny Too -> On Horner -> Simply Silvestri -> 50 Years of Star Trek

    And There are "Specialist" classes:
    Virtuosity
    Ethnic and World
    The Horror
    The Businesses

    I haven't seen all the Masterclasses yet, but from I've already watched this is what I came up with.

    However at the same time I don't know if we want to discourage people from buying let's say Putting it all Together, just because they haven't seen previous classes.
    I started from Kickstarters (actually from what I remebmer my first purchase was: Kickstarters, Secret Weapons, Putting it all together, How to score a film in 7 days). Strange mix, but I never felt lost watching any of those classes.
     
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  3. #3 Mike Verta, Jul 10, 2017
    Don't start with Theory 1. If you're even thinking of starting with Theory 1, then you're still coming from the opposite place I teach from. I almost regret doing that class!

    As for curriculum, they're very deliberately designed to be taken in any order and work just fine. I will often recommend people start with the Comp courses, because they lay important groundwork, but still, I want people to follow their interest and their gut, more than a curriculum. They'll be fine no matter what.
     
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  4. #4 Krzysztof Fokow, Jul 10, 2017
    I think of a Theory 1 Masterclass as a Universal Dictionary. A real beginner class. First steps into music: What is a Major Chord, Minor, Sus2, Sus4, their representation on different kind of clefs, type of scales, what are modes, etc...
    In any way it's not a place to start composing or, as many may think, "the recipe to create good music". It's a place to learn the common language to exchange musical ideas. To be sure that we don't name the same things as "butterfly", "megazord" or "empghr", but we all call it a C major triad. And also not to get scared when you open the Jazz Playbook and you see Ab6/9 above the staves.
    It might sound trivial, but when you try to get into music all those "sus"s, "aug"s and "maj7"s sound like black magic. However if you organize it correctly, then it's the knowledge that can be learned over course of two or three weekends, but still it's good to have someone to guide through the basics.
    There are a lot of online video music classes where if I hear something like: "In order to compose this melody we need to do Aeolian to Phrygian transition and we also need to flatten the fifth", I immediately turn off that video, because I know that is not the way to teach music.
     
  5. #5 Mike Verta, Jul 10, 2017
    I was earning an adult's living at 16 writing music with no knowledge of theory. It's all well and good to have common terminology to discuss and exchange ideas - it is the purpose of theory. It also has absolutely no bearing on the mechanics of writing effective music, and if we're using that way, we are missing a crucial understanding at our foundation, and robbing our developing brains of a chance to create stronger, more controllable skills. If somebody tells us that we have a task to complete, and shows us 10 tools people use to complete that task, we may be robbed of having invented an 11th tool nobody has considered before.

    Nobody has to teach a baby to walk, despite that it is orders of magnitude more complex than writing music. The brain does not need terminological conventions to gain an intuitive understanding of complex systems and patterns, and this is the essence of writing connective music. It is the greatest thing to hear a composer of great melodies not be able to describe what he or she is doing. "I don't know what you call it, but it goes like this and it always works." Now the composer is ready for theory. Now, yes, he or she can discuss with others using common terminology, because the composer actually has something to say, and they have built their understanding on an unbounded universe of possibility. It is best to not know what you do not know at first. One can always introduce theory, but it is difficult to train one, after the fact, to discover elemental truths for themselves.

    My son is learning music, and he is constantly given challenges deliberately beyond his ability and understanding and tasked with solving them anyway. For example, today I have given him back-to-back dotted-eighth-sixteenths and triplet patterns (they're in The Force Theme), and am having him try to figure out what the rhythms are. He has never seen this combination before. As we speak, the things I'm listening to him try are marvelous. It's a puzzle - how fast are those three notes in the triplet? He has decided to turn on a metronome - he knows the pulse must be steady, but how to put three where 4 should be? I'm not ever going to tell him. He's going to figure it out, and understand it in a deeper way than merely giving the answer to him could ever match.
     
    George Streicher, Jay Polk, Sebastian Lammel and 2 others like this.
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